Ditch the second round of the NBA draft

It hurts teams and players

By DAVID THORPE and HENRY ABBOTT

Draft night for most people is fun—a kind of party celebrating careers beginning.

But for players on the fringe of making the NBA, it’s so much more complex, and can just as easily be a sign a career is near ending. Some of those players spend the evening advised by people like David Thorpe, who has been through it many times, and feels personally the ways we could do a better job matching prospects with opportunities.

Last week we talked about how few drafted players become game changers. We continue that conversation with a look at how the draft itself is partly to blame, and how a simple tweak could make it better.

HENRY: Most players are below-average NBA players. I know it's weird, but the math is that a few players are so good that they drag the average up to where it is. But to acquire a typical NBA player, you don’t need a draft pick. Plenty of teams draft and pay players as good as, say, last season’s Jerami Grant. But undrafted Jeff Dowtin Jr. was almost identical in EPM. They were both about average. You can get regular players from the free agency market, or minimum deals, as trade throw-ins.

DAVID: I would argue that drafting them made it worse for the player and the team. This year I spoke to players who were drafted in both rounds. It takes a lot of effort, but I have these guys thinking they're out of the league tomorrow. As in: you are not in the league. You're just dipping a foot in right now. You've got real work to do, and I'm very proud to hear guys in their press conferences talking about finding ways to impact winning possession by possession. They’re not talking about scoring. Not yet. That’s how they’re going to make it: focus on finding ways to impact winning while veterans do the scoring.

Find ways to get on the court, then in the rotation, then go from there. It’s so hard at first. As one player making eight figures next season told me just this week, “it takes a long while to get the game to slow down.” One step at a time.

HENRY: That’s what it says on my wall: “Be the best at getting better.”

DAVID: I was just talking to someone who knows a ton who says that Derik Queen is so talented, like crazy talented, that he never really needed to work on his body. His career hinges on getting better at that. I don’t know him, but I would show him Kevin Love and Nikola Jokić before and after really buckling down with their diets. Then I would bring out the guys who ate themselves right out of the league. Even Paul Millsap was a heavy guy in college. He wasn't as talented as Queen, but he did a lot of hard work and became this lean, athletic dude and lasted a long time.

Most of the names of players drafted that we have been going through are not game changers. Most are not even good NBA players. But it's not because they aren't good enough to be good NBA players. It’s because something got in the way of that.

HENRY: You're getting me all excited. Going back to the beginning of drafts in sports: the whole point was, some running back from Minnesota held out in 1935, started a bidding war, and got the highest salary in the NFL right out of college. The league concocted a way to prevent bidding wars for rookies. Ta da! That’s why we have drafts. They don't want bidding wars for Kevin Garnett right out of school. Cost controls are the point of it. (Competitive balance, argues an economist who has studied it more than anyone, is mostly a smokescreen.)

Meanwhile, this draft system lets bad GMs stay in place forever. Team’s terrible? We’ll get ‘em next time.

But suddenly I’m thinking the league might be OK with a much smaller draft. There is no crisis paying Ryan Nembhard. He became a free agent on draft day after going undrafted just like that running back from Minnesota. But Ryan got a two-way deal from the Mavericks without upsetting any billionaires with his exorbitant salary. The market set Ryan’s salary at a point that everyone accepts.

Cooper Flagg would start a bidding war that would upset billionaires. But that dynamic that the billionaires want a draft to control costs only matters so deep into the talent pool. How deep? Maybe 15 picks? The league still has a salary cap. Would they really go nuts spending on Yang Hansen or Joan Beringer who were picked 16th and 17th?

DAVID: I've been going through drafts and finding these game changers … makes me think a ten-player draft might be enough. I think you said that a week ago and you are spot on.